Dolomites: on the slopes with Reinhold Messner

Cortina d'Ampezzo, 1920s

Time to go skiing, time to go to the Dolomites! Let’s take Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner’s advice, and visit the beautiful mountains scattered between Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli. Our gallery’s 20th-century posters can give but a glimpse of their dizzying, enjoyable beauty.

“Dolomiti, Dolomites, Dolomiten: the name sounds wonderful in any language. It comes from Dolomieu, the man who turned science into adventure by heading to these mountains before anybody else, moved by a desire to explore their nature. He crossed them over long journeys, almost entirely completed on foot, following various roads, without porters, sleeping in the open, under the stars, sometimes in the company of fellow students: he was a noble ‘geology gentleman’ who invented another aristocracy – the aristocracy of the mountain, as a lifestyle choice and an opportunity for knowledge.”

“[…] The name of Dolomieu resonates among the echoes in the Dolomites […], a name that evokes a subtle wind of history. History that can be read between the slender and silent rocks of what Le Corbusier called ‘the most beautiful natural architecture in the world’. Climbing them one by one, you can hear them speak, summit after summit, group after group, about different aspects and moments of a single history, beginning in the remotest antiquity of nature” (translated from L. Zanzi, “Dolomieu. Un avventuriero nella storia della natura”, Jaca Book, Milan 2003).